The Man who Shot Valiant Liberty
by Faolin Shadeslayed
Summary: When water proved impossible to burn and fire could never be put out, the fire grew bored with the battle. So it built a new opponent for itself - iron. It, and the rest of the world, got a lot more than it bargained for. And the balance of power between Magic and Technology was shattered, by the last person either side expected to turn traitor - Harry Evans. H/Hr...eventually.
1. Prologue: This Is the Life

_Far away in a pasture in Scotland, there lived a wolf and a shepherd. The wolf continually raided the shepherd's flock, as wolves often do, and the shepherd on occasion would shoot the wolf in some vital organ, causing it great injury, as is the wont of such folk. This uneasy give-and-take continued for some time._

_But the shepherd grew tired of violence, and one day, as the wolf approached for his morning meal of a fat lamb, he approached the wolf. "You," he said, "are continually devouring my animals, and I am wounding you as much as I can. This cannot go on. I propose an agreement between us, so that I do not waste my lead and time and you do not waste your life. You guard my sheep, for the wages of one lamb a month, and I will not harm you in any way. That way, I can rest and you can eat. Is that fair?" The wolf assented, and the shepherd left his sheep for the pub in town._

_The next day, the shepherd came to visit his flock, only to discover the wolf had made an end of every sheep. He was enraged. "Why did you go back on my agreement?" he screamed in frustration. "I thought we had a deal!" _

_The wolf looked at him, quizzically. Then he spoke. "I thought you knew what you were getting yourself into when you hired a wolf to tend your flock," he said, slowly. "You don't mean to tell me you expected me not to devour the whole lot of those animals? Be serious."_

"_I'll kill you!" the man screamed, and then the wolf up and made an end of him in disgust. And neither wolf nor sheep were heard of again in those parts._

_What is the moral of this story? If you trust your enemy, he will up and eat your sheep. And then you will starve, and beg for beer from your townsfolk, because you have no livelihood. And you will have wool lying scattered around your house, with wolf spittle coating it. Verily, verily, that is the way of the world._

Evidently, Evans was in a melodramatic frame of mind at present. It must be forgiven. He had slept only five minutes that night, wide awake, poring over road maps to Nevada through the night, and working hard to forge his government security clearance. Sleep deprivation was not conducive to good judgment in a ten-year-old. Perhaps it had been a detriment to Evans to be told to act his age so many times in his youth, as certainly his body did if not his mind. Nothing had changed but his tolerance for caffeine, which he had stolen in the form of coffee from a brewery a block away in enough quantities to feed an army.

Hermione fared slightly better with the interruption of a normal sleep cycle, but she was as resilient as could be expected for a young researcher in an area of Texas known for its gang wars; that is to say, paranoid and ready to shoot her stolen gun at any provocation. More than seventy gang members had died while trying to enter the warehouse they were staying in. They must have been drawn by the computer monitors Evans was trying to cobble together out of washing machine parts. No matter. The plan would not be hurt if a few gang members were to mysteriously disappear; the gang wouldn't care, and the sheriff would only congratulate them for their aiming skills if he found out.

Nearly nothing could hurt the plan, now. In five days, they could end their flight from the law, and maybe – just maybe – they could get their lives back.

ooooo

September 14, 1989.

It is time I made a sense of this mess. I need to talk my history over with Hermione; there are too many loose ends I've found without even trying. The incident with the aircraft: what was that about? And why was…no, there's no time for that. I'll put down my history, and then, if I still don't understand I'll talk it over.

_**A Supremely and Starkly Concise History of H.J. Evans, nee Potter,**_ he scribbled on the wall. Then he paused – looked it over – moved down a line.

_Our story begins, as so many do, with a birth – mine. At the age of zero, I was born to one James Potter, evidently a secret agent for some secret British counterterrorism wing called Phoenix Division, or as it has been inexplicably been referred to in the several times it has been referenced, the Order of the Phoenix, and Lily Evans, whose name I have taken for the sake of my own dignity, a researcher on the Helix Generator who developed the rudiments of a functional electroatomic reaction before giving her work up to marry Mr. Potter and give birth to me. I will not call them my parents; parents care for their children, and they so evidently did n- that is irrelevant. _

_I was born in a secret camp hidden in the middle of London, codenamed St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, delivered using experimental methods that are inexplicably classified as Magic. Everything referred to in the first year of my life has been relentlessly and categorically classified by Phoenix Division, or else self-censored by Lily Evans, who took the trouble to record my first year of life. My first year was uneventful, and I did little besides breastfeed, sleep, and salivate that should be noted that I can readily understand. During that time, for reasons I will never understand I levitated objects with some fervor, turned the area around me to iron or marble (an admirable sense of fashion for one so young), which Lily referred to as Transfiguration, and succeeded in animating statues of knights and famous personages upon several occasions, setting them upon my guardians and family friends known by the auspicious title of Marauders. This was referred to as Magic, from which I conclude I was genetically modified to manifest these powers by my __**loving**__ parents, if this is not a metaphor for some darker project (as is very probable.)_

_As the subject of my parents now manifests itself, I will indulge the reckless curiosity of myself and my other reader, one Hermione Granger, to be mentioned later, by a history of them. My male progenitor, James Potter, was the scion of a rich family so deeply mired in Codename Magic, as I will call the program in which I was born, that it was jokingly called an Ancient and Noble House by the members of the project. He was a troublemaker and pest to all humanity, slacking off the studies required in said division except for codenames Transfiguration and Quidditch, referred to in the most infuriating cipher known to man, which was an aerial sport in which pilots flew "brooms" (only God and the persons in said project know what kind of aircraft they are) and caught "Snitches" by means of some sort of grappling hook. But this veers off our subject. Suffice it to say, he caused female members of Codename Magic to lust after his body, and played pranks on some of the more serious element of CM in boot camp, one Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. That is all._

_The woman of whom I am directly descended was recruited from a civilian family at the age of eleven, and ever since devoted her life to greater knowledge of "Magic" until James turned his attention to her. She was a prodigy in all subjects in boot camp except "Quidditch", which she was woefully inadequate in, but chose to spend most of her time developing the Helix Generator, which channeled raw amounts of "Magic" which the members of Codename Magic spent their time manipulating with wooden devices known as wands. She originally meant it as a source of free electricity without radioactivity to the citizens of Britain, but electromagnetic pulses from said generator crippled her efforts. I refined it, and had reason on several occasions to curse her stupidity on the second lock, which- but I digress; that will be addressed later. She originally rightly reviled James, but in the end his good looks and overall 'bad boy' image won her hormones over; her mind followed suit, and she left off that project which has fundamentally changed the balance of power in the world for that idiot's abs and…_

_Suffice it to say that at age one and a half, a terrorist known as Voldemort, a former participant in CM and a talented fighter, entered my home and murdered my parents by voice-activated electromagnetic pulses from a wooden device called a "wand". He attempted to do the same to me, as any reasonable person would have done, but the pulse backfired and he quite nearly murdered himself. It was quite sufficient to knock his soul from his body, which promptly divided in two, one half entering me and another flying off into the distance. The leader of CM, one Albus Dumbledore, took me to the home of my former guardians, Vernon and Petunia Dursley. Here is where my story really begins, and here begins the plethora of plot holes._

_These fine personages had the misfortune to discover me on their doorstep, the next morning._

_Obviously, this was not taken well by either Vernon or Petunia, but they made the best of it by placing me in a cupboard under the stairs and having no contact with me for several years, sending food through a slit in the doorway. Thankfully, they had stored some of their surplus books there as well, which gave me something to do with my time. In a month, I was able to read, and in a course of another year I had…there is no time for boasting. The principal thing to note during my long imprisonment is that I had gained no sense of the idiocy those above me called Morality, and no sense of how human beings interacted with each other._

_When I was let out, at age three, I did not speak, as I did not know how, nor did I understand spoken word, as I had memorized the patterns of words and letters rather than attempt to speak them, preferring to speak in Morse Code, in which I was very fluent. I also was unable to walk, as I had never done so before. Eating had previously consisted of elaborate rituals to apologize to the animals and plants I had eaten for their deaths and for my rampant consumption of living beings, and then a hearty crushing and kneading of the food with my fingers, which greatly confused the Dursleys when they saw my meals. I also had not taken a bath in years, and so was understandably covered in sores and dirt. Reeducation to human company took two years. This time, however, was not wasted._

_I learned of drawing, and took considerable time to practice it, and animated television shows and manga, which I strove to emulate. I was unable to grasp any bearing of literary plot device or characterization, but I did gain a considerable knowledge of drawing, which I use to this day. Heavy machinery was…there is no need to recount my early history, and interests. Suffice it to say that I was extremely interested in machinery (as I still am) and Gothic architecture (which I continue to take pleasure in), and leave it at that. What I did, up to age four, was perfectly normal for a sociopathic, amoral child who grew up without the shackles of the Freudian model of child psychology. Let us speak no more of this topic. Matters of far greater import await us._

_At age four, I happened upon a certain chest, which had belonged to my mother and had been left behind when the Potters visited my aunt and uncle's wedding, evidently. This chest contained a complete set of journals detailing my mother's life, mentioned above. I have already detailed the life history of both my progenitors, but these diaries mentioned far more than that, as they refer to secret disciplines not even the Pentagon has knowledge of. I will list them here:_

_**Transfiguration:**__ A science which apparently is able to change the structure of atoms in seconds, with the unfortunate limitation of not being able to produce rare earth metals. The methods of Transfiguration are unclear, and are referred to as wandwork, which is of course absurd. This points to the hypothesis that whatever is used to change said atoms is unethical, dangerous, or both. This has immense applications, as carbon fiber and other industrially useful materials can readily be produced from human waste and the vast quantity of garbage humans produce. _

_**Potions:**__ This is not a mechanical discipline but rather a division of chemistry under Phoenix Division. I am unable to understand any of what its applications are, as the effects of said discipline are absurd and so useful they seem blatant wish fulfillment. I would almost write off said discipline, save for the fact that all real technology contained in these journals is almost freakishly reliable and founded in sound science. Most chemical formulas are encoded, with ingredients being things like "eye of newt" and "dragon heartstring," and some of these chemicals' effects cause me to believe the substances covered in said discipline are reality-bending steroids that break all reality merely to benefit the user. This science appears to be the most secret of all, as evidenced by its handling in the journal._

_**Charms: **__Another branch of chemistry, which has a wide area effect of causing people to hallucinate. The hallucinations these substances create are very specific, ranging from believing an object is floating to believing an object has come alive. All formulas to these chemicals are omitted, not even encoded, and this is readily understandable, as some of the effects of said charms are extremely disorienting and useful on the battlefield._

_**History of Magic:**__ This whole discipline is absolutely fantastic, and any indication of the true nature of History of Magic is maddeningly incomprehensible. It is said to be taught by a ghost, and focuses on goblin rebellions. It could be considered to be a study on military tactics, were it not for the fact that the course never had any focus on specific tactical maneuvers. This is worrisome, as whatever is transpiring in History of Magic is so secret it cannot even be alluded to._

_ All the rest of these disciplines are either mundane subjects (Astronomy, Herbology) with unique focuses, or absolute gibberish like Ancient Runes or Divination to any but participants in the project, as History of Magic was. Be it as it may, these journals contained the life story of my female progenitor, Lily Potter nee Evans, and this information. During the course of my reading, there was one person which confused me – Severus Snape, my mother's sometime friend and sometime enemy. He was singularly unpleasant, but for reasons unknown his insults were contained to the issue of parentage, and length of family participation in Codename Magic. This is absolutely absurd. What project would accept obstructionists such as him? What checks were there for him? And-_

There came a knocking at the door of the warehouse, and Evans opened the door, cautiously, but with a stolen revolver in hand. Caution was a virtue, in a place like this. In front of him stood a police officer, holding a receipt from the American equivalent of Tesco on it.

"You are under arrest for blatant murder of blah blah blah crimes against humanity blah blah use of illegal weaponry, etc. ….violation of private property? Public indecency? Libel? Eating ice cream without a cone?" the officer muttered, then threw down the paper. "Do you have any idea how long it took for me to find you? I've searched all over this county looking for your hide! Do you not care that-"

There was no more to say. Evans fired, hitting the bobby straight in the chest, then shot his eyeball in case the man was tempted to escape. Then he took the man's pistol, looked around, then tossed away his revolver. He turned around.

"Hermione! That's the third one in a week! We have to leave the lab!" he shouted, indignantly.

"But-"

"But nothing! We can't do research if we're dead!"

There was an audible sigh from the back of the room. Then a cluster of bottles could be heard breaking on the floor.

Boise, Idaho. Population 125,738 souls, or at least those who bothered to report themselves.

The number, Evans thought, was far too low to mean anything but trouble. The surest sign of a secret air base was too many shops, and except for the university the town was a giant mall. The Department of Defense was not known for its farming, and pilots had to eat somewhere. No, he could write it off. The base wasn't on the list he was approved for, and there was no doubt he would be shot on sight even attempting to enter without clearance. _If _he could find it, which was a different matter entirely.

Around a base, most people without some legitimate reason for existing would be quietly killed in a "car accident" or some other convenient excuse. That had been the largest cause of death in the USSR for twenty-five consecutive years, he recalled. And the Russians didn't have half the resources America did. As he was already a fugitive, drowning or even discovery by the police was as convenient of a death as it could get. No, they'd have to go south. All the way to Las Vegas.

Well, there went any hope of reaching Mountain Home that winter. He'd have to forge a clearance, and that would take weeks. SAC had the best mainframe short of Absolut Nirgends' missile targeting system. He knew; Hermione had designed it. Under his orders, too! And she'd not even remembered to give herself a way to hack back in. _Well, that's another month gone._

May 12, 1990.

A good many decades ago, Ernest Shackleton had launched a mission to Antarctica, hoping to reach the South Pole, and presumably use his achievement as a pick-up line in any bar he came across. However, the voyage had failed spectacularly when his boat was trapped in pack ice. By the end his men were reduced to eating seal backbone, marooned on a rocky island, where they hid under a lifeboat and presumably cried themselves to sleep while watching _Days of Our Lives _or whatever sailors did for entertainment back then.

Needless to say, his exploit was a failure, and back home the soldiers who survived trench warfare had by this time claimed the hearts of whatever women frequented English pubs. Now that he is dead, most people venerate him for getting himself trapped in the middle of nowhere, though they dress it up in words like "leadership" and "endurance" instead of telling the truth about his stupidity.

Today, Harry Evans was set to launch himself into a mission to Nevada, similarly remote though not nearly as cold, where he would use it as a pick-up line with the Department of Defense. There were no seals in that area of the world to eat, which troubled him somewhat, but _Days of Our Lives _was playing on more stations than the Antarctic. Not as many people would venerate him for endurance or leadership, probably because he would drive the whole way on a stolen motorbike instead of rowing a lifeboat, but that was, perhaps, for the best.

Comparisons to the voyage of the Titanic were unwelcome, but he'd gotten more of them than he necessarily wanted, mostly from his first mate, Hermione Granger. Unfortunately, her experiment on the Generator's potential as an invisibility device would have to be curtailed, and the machine Evans had spent seventeen weeks building would be destroyed along with it. It is quite natural that objections would be raised, but nevertheless they were irksome. _That damn experiment never could be finished anyway. Stupid hazardous metal restrictions always got in the way. _

"**Evans!** What are you doing? You look like you've spaced out!"

"I'm merely reflecting on the merits of making the invisibility generator invisible, instead of destroying it. On the one hand, we'll keep it safe, but then we'll never see it again. More's the pity; I did somewhat like it, though the humming noise it made was less than relaxing."

"I'm sorry, too." Hermione sighed. "Thirteen weeks of experimentation, all up in smoke because you wanted to go to Vegas. If you weren't so good at your poker face I'd have stayed behind."

"Shall we write an epitaph? This deserves a proper send-off."

"From all accounts, loss takes longer to set in when it comes quickly. Throw it in the river or something."

"If you say so." Evans took one last look at his…experiment, or at least the visible bits (two Frisbees held together with duct tape), then thrust it through the bars of the bridge and let it fall.

July 30, 1991.

"Mail for you, Evans! A letter from DeVry University - one from some charity about stiff upper lips or something – a pack of coupons from the grocery – oh! Here's one from Phoenix Division! You're in, too, I suppose. 'Ancient and Noble House' is right!"

"I'd like to remind you, Hermione, that I disowned my 'father' some time ago."

"True, but your genes say otherwise. Like to open it?"

"Sure, might as well."

It was a fine letter, for its kind; the sort some exclusive private school would send to a prospective student, elegantly decorated in green ink with wretched drawings of a phoenix and a dragon, with something about titillating a dragon in a dormitory in Latin. "Room 104, Tropicana Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA" was written on it in spidery handwriting. But it seemed odd, because the same letter had come for Hermione, the day before her birthday. Some of the allure was missing, now that the second had arrived; it was like Jesus Christ descending down from Heaven with trumpets blaring at three in the morning to deliver the morning paper – very ornate, true, but becoming rather annoying rather quickly, and rather absurd. The whole thing was in code, anyway.

He opened it, and was not disappointed to find the same list that Hermione had received. "LetWork robes, cauldrons, et cetera. That's somewhat disappointing."

"It's a form letter," Hermione said thoughtfully. "It's a big division, so no personalization. Very odd. Still no explanation, or way to get said supplies. I wonder, perhaps they do take all this 'magic' rot seriously, and this is all gibberish that only people with this magic talent could understand?"

"No, you made a book explode you got bored with when you were three, remember? I forget what it was. War and Peace?"

"A dictionary, actually.


	2. The Stage Is Set

_**A/N:  
**_

This story uses strong language in places, and while viewer discretion should _probably_ be advised if a fic is rated T, I felt I should warn you before continuing.

**PROLOGUE: THE OPENING SALVO**

3:07 AM, GMT.

Nineteen eighty-nine.

The buses at this hour were irregular, and had about a one in seventeen chance of arriving at all that night. The only scheduled stops to Little Whinging, Surrey, were at nine in the morning (terrible) and at six forty-five in the evening (worse), but sometimes, every three or so weeks, one passed through, at around three fifteen in the morning, for some unknown reason, to drop off a few passengers in flowing robes carrying boxes with _Top Secret _stamped on them, who disappeared into the shadows- or what shadows anyone could glean in a place like Privet Drive- as quickly as they stepped out. Harry kept a timetable, and, this being the nineteenth day since they had arrived, with the most common day of arrival being Saturday, the chances were slim but not unreasonable that they might make an appearance a day early.

That had happened four times in the last two years, but those four were clustered around springtime, and that raised the chances of an early arrival to six percent. A six percent chance…was not worth mentioning anytime else, but then he had packed his bags already, and it was Friday night, the next day...

Where the hell was he?

What the hell was this?

All he could remember was that he had a suitcase full of money and papers, and he had to get to Heathrow by six.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Defense contracting was hard work for a nine-year-old, and it nearly cost Harry his life, but it entertained.

Looking back, his interest in weaponry could be traced back to second grade. Two weeks before summer vacation, the school announced a science fair, and Harry was seized with a desire to make an entry, if only to do something that _didn't_ bore him to tears with his classmates. That year, the school allowed students to vote for their favorite entry, and their vote would count along with the decisions of two other judges, the science and mathematics teachers. He had been regarded as too head-in-the clouds to do anything productive by the student body (though their ideas of productivity were more…sports-oriented than his own), and the reputation had haunted him all through that year. Particularly, he had been mocked for his research into aerodynamics and higher math, which he was using to try to build a fighter jet by the end of the year, which irked him immensely. _He was building a __**fighter plane,**__ Jove blast it! How was that not productive?_

It would be easy to make a design. For an aerodynamics exhibit, he would build a 1/1.5 scale attack aircraft, that had VTOL capability, and launch fireworks from it. That would show them. He even had the design ready. He just needed paper and some metal blades, and he could have it done in a week.

He tried to enlist Hermione Granger, the school's resident teacher's pet, sure that she would understand the concepts that went into jet design, but she turned him down- violently, claiming she was a pacifist and that he was a "warmongering ironclad freak with delusions of grandeur" who deserved to be arrested, not "allowed to learn at such a prestigious school, you unworthy, unfit disgrace to humanity!" That smarted a little- its only payload was fireworks, and they only killed idiots that couldn't handle them properly, thank you very much- but that was only a little loss. After a few days, he was able to convince a piñata manufacturer to let him use paper-mache for free, in exchange advertising his business. It wasn't the exchange of ideas he longed for, but at least it would make him a jet. Hermione called him a corporate sellout when she heard the news, and spat on him. He returned that she only could afford to be an idealist because her parents had money, and that she was a privileged hypocrite who should reject bumming pocket money from her parents and come down to the same level as the rest of the class. Comparisons to Hitler started flying from both students, and the discourse only went downhill from there.

A few students opposed to Hermione joined him after that, along with one girl whose father worked at the JAA. He was sincerely grateful, though they never came out and said they supported _him._ They managed to cobble together the wings Saturday, and make an engine from spare parts on Sunday evening. By Monday, the cockpit controls were finished, and the plane was certified as experimental on Wednesday. Thursday, the plane was ready for testing.

On the shores of a deserted port a mile inland, the plane (which they named XP-42 for reasons not even Harry could comprehend) was readied for takeoff from an abandoned barge. The JAA inspectors had pronounced it airworthy, and everything on it had been tested Tuesday and found to be in working order, but still there hung over the crew a sense of dread and anticipation, as even Harry was a little skeptical it could actually fly. The group drew straws to see who would pilot it, as nobody seemed to be willing to take the controls and trust his or her life to it, but Harry forgot that the straws he brought were all the same length, and he was forced to be pilot for the day.

He jumped onto the barge, and clambered up a makeshift ladder into the cockpit. Thankfully, there weren't too many buttons, as Hermione managed to offend a surprising number of computer geniuses and one of them volunteered to set the plane on near autopilot, but there were plenty of monitors to go around, and Harry looked around, somewhat curious as to how it looked (although he had designed the cockpit, he hadn't actually done any work on the plane; he just brought the materials).

"Hurry up!" somebody shouted. "We haven't got all day!"

With a sigh, he flicked on the engines, and pressed a red button with "Takeoff" scrawled on it. The bubble closed, and he was enclosed in the plane. For a split second, he regretted his making the cockpit out of plastic – wood would give it that nice luxury-car touch which the instruments broken off a scrapped Mercedes tried to provide – but then the engine cut in, and there wasn't time for thinking. The plane started to lift itself off the ground- a few inches at first, as Harry panicked a little- and then faster, and faster, till it lit its afterburners and rocketed out of the harbor at two hundred miles an hour. The crew must have wolf whistled, but Harry didn't. He just panicked for his life.

He finally managed to put the plane down, in the bus parking lot of the school, with a crowd of fifteen hundred watching. He hadn't actually flown much, leaving it to the autopilot, and resolved to find a video gamer to fly the plane; anyone would be better than he.

The fair took place the next day, in the parking lot, and the whole neighborhood, along with a handful of reporters bored out of their skulls, came to watch. Nineteen people had put their necks forward to compete, not least among them Granger, who to her eternal credit put up a display on chemical weaponry which won third place. It was ostensibly to test gas masks, but Harry could overlook that. (When he came to congratulate her, a few days later, she broke his jaw, complaining about fair play and non-consumerism.) Few others were so bold, and eleven were on the breeding habits of mice. The rest…the only one worth noting was Piers Polkiss', which simulated a volcano, complete with extreme heat and sulfuric acid. That was very much worth noting, but the events of the day unfortunately eclipsed it.

The votes came in from the students, overwhelmingly for Polkiss, Potter, and Granger. Harry won, though not quite by the overwhelming majority he had hoped, garnering seventy-nine percent of the vote, followed by Hermione with fifteen. Perhaps he was too harsh competition, and Harry did admit later that his experiment was more technology than science anyway. Nobody held grudges, however, and it was quite probable that the rest of the day would go without incident, had it not been for the judges.

By four PM, the judges announced they had reached a decision, and the crowd waited breathlessly, in anticipation. The English teacher struck up a drumroll, with the rest of the spectators following suit.

"The judges of the seventeenth annual Little Whinging Science Fair are pleased to announce the winner of this competition, who will receive a trip to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, all expenses paid. _Very_ pleased indeed."

Tension was about as high as one could expect from a competition containing a ten meter high replica volcano, that is to say, in a state of frenzy.

"But first, we would like to make an announcement to the people voting in this competition. Seventy-nine percent of you have chosen the warmongering design of our very own _ironclad idiot, Harry Potter. _He's so full of hatred he built an attack aircraft at seven, for fuck's sake!The lot of you should all have been drowned at birth. You are responsible for the war in the Falklands, aren't you! Why don't you all burn in hell like you deserve, you imperialist swine! We're throwing out _your_ votes.

"Twenty percent chose the design of Hermione Granger. While she's had a good track record for being a good person, she's obviously been corrupted, as shown by her despicable exhibit. There is no threat, so she must want one to design a better gas mask. Vicious little bitches won't get awards at _this_ school. You're disqualified."

The crowd stared in shock. There were no words. Everyone protested, but nobody spoke.

"And Polkiss deserves some credit for making a reasonable exhibit, but Britain doesn't have any volcanoes, so he is not worthy of consideration. Now, to the winner! Drumroll, please…"

Nobody moved.

"And the winner is Michael Smithson, with his exhibit on field mice! Second place is Eric Gottwald, with his exhibit on DDT and its harmful effects on birds! Third place is James Faulkner, with a display on field mice. That is all. Enjoy the rest of…"

A scream interrupted her. Or really, two screams, but they were so close together they were impossible to tell apart. Harry dashed out of his seat, towards his plane, while Hermione scrambled towards the podium. Hermione was first to reach her target, and decked the judge in the face. Harry clambered into the cockpit, and punched the takeoff button like the world would explode if he did not. The crowd rushed, as one, to the judges, and it was quite possible that a few would have lost limbs if the fight continued. But a roar caught their attention.

The XP-42 shot into the stopped directly over the podium. Fifteen hundred noisemakers dropped from the sky, and few had time to react before the charges hit, stunning the crowd. Another bay opened on the wing, as if to say, "Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels, disperse!" and the mob scattered as if the devil himself had appeared in a cloud of fire.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooo

What the hell was that?

It was cold, and he tried to take his mind off it by looking around the neighborhood. But that was no use. The familiar sodium-vapor lights glared at him, from their places high up on poles, and homes exactly identical surrounded him like rows of mushrooms on a rotting log. _Where did that come from?_ His mind slipped when he stayed up too late. He would have to change that later. H. the insomnia producer? Seemed like a worthy goal, at this point. His body…so weak…

Then- miracle of miracles- a light appeared at the end of the road. It was so beautiful! The bus was early! A one-in-seventeen chance! Exquisite! Only a few more hours, and he could finally escape the confines of that damned island, Great Britain, for good! Only a few more days, and he would be rid of the company of the ignorant and _finally _join the engineers he spied so much on! Brilliant. _People didn't care about it when they said "Brilliant." Just another expression of mild praise. But it's so beautiful, that's the only word to describe it! Like a thousand nuclear bombs detonating at once, carving a hole in the Earth's crust and exposing the lava underneath! Like a volcano burying ignorant politicians in ash and flame! Like his DD-1 fighting the Sun for supremacy, losing, and bathing the universe in a wash of light as the mighty atom reigned supreme forever over the work of simple men like him!_ Good Lord, what was all that? DD-1? He was insane. He had to do something about it, and soon.

The bus stopped, a little anticlimactically, at his station, and the doors slid open. The usual group of robed figures flitted out of the bus, looked him over for a minute, then disappeared, as was their strange custom. But now that he could see them, they…disappeared? How in the hell? But there wasn't time to worry about that, the doors would probably close soon. He jumped inside, swinging his suitcase through the door, then handed the driver a few pounds, so nervous he nearly dropped it. The man, inexplicably dressed in combat gear and wearing half of a pair of sunglasses, looked him over, inquisitively, then gave a slow nod.

"Good luck."

Harry jumped.

"Wait, what?"

"We've been watching you, Harry. We know about the Bomb, and the algebra you've stayed up all night doing, and the atoms you keep on splitting like there's no tomorrow. We know about the Plane, and the bombs and the war. And I say bring it on. I was going to pick you up one of these nights, and get you out of this hellhole you live in, but you caught on first, and good on you. We're…what's your name?"

"Harry…Harry Potter. But I prefer Evans, if that's all right."

"Yes…we'll leave you alone, once we get to America. You'll have trouble enough with the spies _there_" (and the driver gave a shudder) "without us."

"They almost have my Doomsday Device figured out. Good Lord, is there anything they don't know?"

"They've been tracking you too, you know. Don't understand why. They've kept off your designs, as they don't want to kill the golden goose by offending you and having you go running off to the Soviets (don't do that, mind; ever), but don't cross them, all right?"

"Er…understood."

Both fell silent, and the driver paused. Then he slammed the floor pedal, and took off towards Heathrow.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Captain has turned off the Fasten Seat Belt sign, and you may now move around the cabin. However we always recommend keeping your seat belt fastened while you're seated. You may now turn on your electronic devices such as calculators and CD players.

In a few moments, the flight attendants will be passing around the cabin to offer you hot or cold drinks, as well as breakfast. Alcoholic drinks are also available with our compliments. Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. Thank you."

Row 25 was, quite possibly, the loudest thing Harry's eardrums ever had to endure, and he thought with a sigh that it would have better to bring earplugs. He didn't know what exactly he had been thinking of when he forged tickets for the Concorde, but this was not one of them. Stupid designers! The cockpit of this plane looked like a glass factory, with all the dials and knobs. That was ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. The Plane never suffered any of this! He…

He hadn't added soundproofing. Damn it all.

He jumped out of his seat, and over the unfortunate businessman on his left, reached for his bag, then rifled through his baggage like he had placed a baby inside and had forgotten about it. _Damn it! Noise cancelling…that would…_He pulled out a notebook- flipped it open and saw drawings for an anti-satellite missile, then shoved it back in as fast as he could- opened another and realized with a start that it was his journal. He shoved it under his arm absentmindedly, almost uncaring of its contents, and then reached for the next. This was the right one. He wished he had remembered to label his notes, but it wasn't too important. He ripped out the cockpit drawings, but then realized, with a groan in his mind, he knew absolutely nothing about soundproofing. _Damn it. God damn it to hell. _

And now he didn't know why he had a plane.

He picked up his journal, and began reading.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooo

_The World at War_

**The Memoirs of H.J. Evans**

**Prologue**

There is no explanation for why men hate each other. All throughout history, nations have invented more and more hypocritical pretexts for murdering others and conquering their land, but in the end they are all self-serving lies. All humans want to see themselves victorious. It is not rational. It is not kind. It is not forgiving. It simply is. That is, on some level, why people live.

There is no explanation for love, either. People freely give their time, money, and kindness to others, often perfect strangers. They look out for them, without hope of reward or repayment. There is no reason why. It, too, is raw and primal, the reason why humans are alive today. But it is no selfish motive. It is no plan to keep men alive, no transaction, no survival measure, though it certainly is that. It is. And that is all.

But there is a clear explanation for me.

I am, in a sense, void of these emotions. I have no bloodlust, though that is hard to claim, considering what I have done to slake men's bloodlust. I have no love for others; they are just distractions. I think too much for either of those emotions.

But I am, in a sense, the perfect machine.

I think, I feel, I know love and hatred, though I have none of them. I am a thinker, and a dreamer, though a dreamer of dreams so alien to the passions of mankind- or at least, the men I have known- that they are incomprehensible. I am a designer at heart, a creator and a player in the primal forces of nature. I am element Harry, a mixture of fire, water, air, and earth. And that is how it should be.

I have done great and terrible things, because I am not a man.

**Chapter One**

(Here Harry paused, stared at the breakfast the attendant offered him, and took it reluctantly. _Salad? On a day like this? What are you, insane? _He raged for a while inside his skull, all the while eating mechanically.)

The accident of my birth deserves little mention, and can be summarized as follows: In some bedroom in a corner of Britain, one Lily Evans, seized with great passion for a secret agent named James Potter, with his…aid attempted to conceive me, and after only fifteen tries over seven days she succeeded. In a hospital in the center of Britain, in a military hospital with the code name St. Mungo's, that Lily Evans attempted to bring me into the world, and after a great amount of pain and unheeded advice from well-meaning doctors, she succeeded. And in an unnamed situation involving a terrorist named Voldemort- for reasons incomprehensible, she referred to him as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named for the rest of her discourse- she attempted to save me, and after a short and painless death she succeeded. That is all my infancy, and from then on I exchanged it for childhood, which was decidedly more eventful.

At the age of one and a half, I was deposited along with a case of milk on the doorstep of Vernon and Petunia Dursley, with a note containing instructions for my upbringing. I have never read it, and likely never will, as it was burned immediately, along with the basket I came in, as soon as it was read. I remember nearly everything of that time. It is unusual, as there is a long blank in my memory from that day to age three. Perhaps it was removed. Most other children I knew remembered vague memories from age two, and clearer ones from three, but mine was…wiped clean. It will come back, someday. At first I could not remember ages eight to nine, which was exceedingly unusual, but I regained the memories with the aid of a newspaper headline. I have no such memorabilia from age two, but someday I will.

Someday.

I did not speak much when I was a toddler. I knew how to, better than Vernon even, but I would never speak more than a few words at a time. I wrote out all the investments I thought best to make, drew pictures of fanciful machinery, and thanked Petunia for the food I made. Silence was not golden. But it was the only possession I had.

At age three, I woke from a long sleep and found myself on the doorstep of a familiar-looking house, along with a case of milk, as before. I did not understand irony in those days, and still do not to an extent, but I do now, and though the thought of that time is unpleasant I laugh uproariously whenever I think of it. I am laughing now, to the everlasting displeasure of my associate Mad-Eye Moo…

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooo

The attendant coughed, a long, slow grating cough that shook Harry enough to drop his pen and shove it roughly into her arms. He cursed loudly, and then picked it up from its lodging in the creases of his shirt and shoved it in his pocket. Forget the journal. He wasn't writing today. He was dead tired, now, almost comatose, and irritated but unable to stir himself long enough to do anything about it. Well, there was one thing.

He grabbed a permanent marker from his lapel, and scrawled on the seat in front of him, "DD-5 Orbital Body Disintegration Device." together with a pictorial design of a warhead which in all practicality would explode upon attempt to manufacture it, in Cyrillic, and a warning not to build it in a code only the CIA would use. What? No time for that, though. He slumped back in his seat, muttered again an imprecation on salad and nosy aircraft crew, and then instantly fell asleep.

He awoke, to the sound of papers rustling.

He was in a bright room, with walls and flooring so white it was impossible to tell one from the other, in a hard-backed metal chair (his favorite brand, he realized, with a start, and shuddered) pulled up to a metal desk. His suitcase lay next to him, but the pages of all the notebooks were missing. Papers littered the desk, and it was glaringly obvious they were all his own. He wasn't bound, and he could see a door a twenty feet in front of him. The ceiling was a hundred feet high, at least, and glass coated the top in one large sheet which showed a perfectly blue sky. A small bell, the sort you ring by punching a knob, was in the middle of the papers, and he punched it once or twice, curious as to what would happen.

Wait.

Had he seen this place before?

He gulped.

The room plan matched exactly the Recruiting Station in Area 51, down to the chair brand. And the Recruiting Station only housed the most important detainees- scientists, physicists, Soviet defectors with nuclear launch codes, and chemists. All had been successfully recruited, and were working in God knows what in a station in the Rockies. But how did he know that?

The door opened.

Someone stepped in, but it was impossible to see who exactly it was, or indeed anything about him. He wore a black gas mask, and full body armor, which served to make him utterly unrecognizable. Behind him filed in seven others, carrying a bowl filled with water, made of shale and held up with iron bars.

"My name is Lieutenant 119, and I'm here to answer all your questions."

"Salvo 003, cleared to land runway 27 left, wind 302 degrees seven knots."

"Cleared to land runway 27 left, Salvo 003."

Fifty meters above ground, then thirty, twenty, fifteen, ten, zero, the sensors showed, and Evans, from his seat in the control tower, started scribbling violently in his notebook. In the chair next to him, Granger pressed a button on her binoculars, and peered intently at a yellow line two hundred meters down the runway. The whine of a jet engine could be heard, but the airfield was deserted, and had been for the last two weeks.

Suddenly, Granger started screaming, and pointed to the line, where out of thin air a small wedge-shaped aircraft materialized, immediately shifting from black to a brilliant shade of blue. The tower erupted in applause, and even Evans cracked a smile, but only for a second. His face fell back to its usual expression of hurt, and the rest to obvious fear.

Today was the seventeenth and last day of testing for the XV-47, and the seventeenth and (hopefully) last day of boredom for the control room crew. For fourteen days straight, Evans, Granger, and seventeen observers from the American Department of Defense had watched – or more appropriately, not watched- the craft test out its invisibility and stealth functions, which consisted in gazing at the sky where the pilot claimed he was with strong binoculars to see what everybody expected, nothing; and gazing at the radar screens to confirm they really did see nothing. After a few days, even straight-laced Hermione started cursing the sheer boredom of the testing regimen, and the pilot as well, claiming he'd just flown off to New York City to kick back, which so surprised and demoralized Evans that he and twelve observers left the room and drove to Heathrow, where they caught a flight to Cancun and didn't return until the sixteenth day.

And it was the sixteenth day which changed everything.

That morning, so indescribably bored she was almost tempted to seek mental help, Hermione buried herself on a book on atomic theory, and had made it up to page 199 when Harry arrived, sporting a tan and a look of profound regret. He saw it, and snatched it off her desk a few minutes later while she was eating, but only to rip page 274 out of the book and start scrawling on the wall, shouting, "It's solved!"

She jumped off her chair and charged at him, shouting about proper care of books, but then stopped when she saw what exactly was written.

"DD-1 Suborbital Body Explosion Device, Block 9A. Large sized warhead, able to be launched by Minuteman III only. Employs reactor design 332A and helix generator 18 instead of core material 192. Blast radius estimated to be 19700 km. Shock wave extends to 25500 km. Crater 2412 km deep. Explosion would lower Earth's temperature 39 degrees for twenty-five years. Cost of production GBP 12,343. Production line creation and retooling costs an estimated GBP 2,142,625. Schematics below:"

Her knees buckled, and she fell down, in abject terror. Oblivious to everything else, Evans finished the drawings, and signed it with his full name. _He only did it when it was…a masterpiece. How could he be so callous?_ He gazed at the plans again, and the smile left his face as quickly as it had come.

Her answer was the sound of him throwing up on the floor.

"This was seven weeks before today."

ooooo

Harry shoved his head out of the bowl of the pensieve, and turned to face the lieutenant.

"I have a question."

"Yes?" came the metallic voice.

"Was I really that obsessive-compulsive?"

"Yes, you were. Do you know why you're not right now?"

"No. Why?"

"That wasn't you in the memory. You were suffering from an acute Confundus even then."

"What's a Confundus?"

An audible breath could be heard, and then 119 smacked himself in the forehead.

"I see the memory damage was greater than I feared. This…this is worse than I anticipated. Your personality…well…you'll have to see a Mind Healer. We're going to have to move you. I can't help you with that."

"What's a Mind Healer?"

The Lieutenant gave no answer, but took a deep breath.

"Your mind has been severely tampered with, and an alert you placed in the event of such a strike went off just yesterday. We sent you to America's largest magical military-industrial complex, Area 51, where you were scheduled to have the memories you lost restored. But it seems as though your mental capabilities and personality traits have been substantially altered, which will take upwards of two years to repair, requiring a Mind Healer's full attention. During that time, you will relive the memories you experienced before your brain was attacked, and when you wake you will be roughly the same person as your original self."

"And are there any side effects?" Harry asked, bewildered.

"You will gain various minor eccentricities, often related to the consumption of food, and venerate certain items, usually major technological discoveries or natural phenomena. Your dreams will also change significantly, centering on roadways, bridges, and architecture," came the reply. "Mind therapy has not advanced significantly enough to prevent mutations of your brain from occurring during treatment. Are there further questions?"

"Why am I this important?"

"You'll see."

Then a needle was injected into his arm, seemingly from nowhere, causing him to lash out in uncontrollable pain. He writhed uncontrollably, screamed, but blacked out a few seconds later.

ooooo

He was in a room, blindingly bright, on a small marble platform surrounded by deep water. It was crystal clear, and he could not determine where the bottom was, but somehow he knew if he fell in he would die.

He was on an aircraft with no windows, being served iced tea in a coffee can, with a soldier urging him to drink.

He was hanging from the roof of a tall building, suspended from a twenty foot long girder, hanging over central London. The breeze was cold, but refreshing, and he felt as if he could stay there forever.

He was on a life raft, in a storage tank in an oil refinery. He held a lit match in his hand, and knew that he couldn't hold on much longer before his arm got tired.

He was dead, and he saw his corpse being embalmed. Pine resin was slathered on his body, then maple syrup, then whipped cream, and eventually gasoline was poured on the decaying mess and Harry James Potter, or Evans, as he preferred to be called, age nine, technical designer, programmer, and CEO of Vernichtung GmbH, burned. And something broke, and he lit up with the fire of a thousand suns…

ooooo

Evans awoke, but it was not the waking he wanted. The drugs forced into his system had induced powerful hallucinations, not memories, and memories were vital. It was blindingly obvious he should have moved, though. Spies were spies were spies, whether American or Soviet or English, and he had seen too much of them to not trust he was impacted in some way. He felt tired, as though he had run a marathon with a missile on his back, and somehow he was sure that was the effect of the drugs. He had to get away! Any moment now the lieutenant might be back, to this time cause some unknown effect to his emotions, or torture information out of him. Only God knew what they would do with his knowledge. Not that it was any good to him, not being able to access it, but if they knew and he didn't…!

He looked around, staring into every corner of the room for cameras, and saw he was in a hotel room. He was lying on the only bed, and indeed the only piece of furniture in the room, the rest strangely missing. _Good, less areas for bugs. _He scoured every inch of the bed, even going so far as to tear the mattress open, but found no recording devices of any kind. There was a window, but when he looked out all he could see was a parking lot, and then an interstate highway ten meters behind it.

He looked in his pockets for anything useful, but found only lint and a pack of cigarettes. _No lighter._ After running to the exit, he unbolted it, and tried to turn the handle. It wouldn't open, being one of those infernal designs that need a key to leave as well as to get in. _Why the hell would anyone make a door like that? Must be some sort of trap, or a test. Playful controllers? This complicates things. _He cursed, and went back to the shards of the bed. A few mattress springs were ripped out, and sharpened on the steel air conditioner. Then he ran to the door, and started to file away the wood around the keyhole.

As if reading his mind, the door opened.

He wondered now if this was a trick, like the five other dreams he had, but he didn't care. Best to treat it like it was real life. It couldn't hurt to be cautious. He threw down a spring in front of the door, but an instant before it hit the ground the floor fell open, and it cascaded down before hitting some unseen body of water with a deep splash. Another spring was flung at the ceiling, which only caused it to bounce off and hit the floor, falling into the same hole as the last one. _What…the…bloody…_

He looked at his clothes- blue jeans, a sweater with "I'm an idiot" written on it _(more playfulness, it seemed_) and a baseball cap with the New York Yankees logo on it. _That was the last straw! A prank? Who the blazes would give him a Yankees cap? He __**hated**__ the Yankees_. No shoes, which meant no easy rope to make from the shoestrings, but that wasn't too much of a loss. Nearly anything could be made into rope. _Now they weren't even trying to keep him. At least he wasn't in maximum security or anything._

Another spring was sharpened to make a knife, which Evans used to cut the sweater into strips. More springs were torn out, and the sweater pieces held them together into claws. Evans took a running jump, and punched into the roof, then clawed his way down the hall, making sure never to touch the ground. It was hard work, too hard almost for a nine year old, but then that was why it was a test and not a prank. It made a twisted amount of sense. An endurance course as treatment for mental injuries? Who the hell was the psychiatrist for the DoD?

A few doors down, he could hear the panting of a lovemaking couple, which reassured him this was a legitimate hotel, at least part of the time. He dropped to the floor, shoved his claws in his pockets, and ran pell-mell to the lobby.

It appeared to be breakfast time at the hotel, and he grabbed half a dozen pastries at the continental breakfast before walking to the door. But when he reached it, he stopped in shock. The doors were automatic, and the instructions for an emergency seemed to be in German.

He cursed loudly, and swiped seventeen waffles before hurrying out. The street in which he found himself was utterly unfamiliar, and he took one look at the language of the "Unauthorized vehicles will be towed" sign before screaming in frustration. Again, German! _Where the bloody hell __**am **__I?_

A car pulled up, at just that moment, black with tinted windows, and the Lieutenant stepped out, with a balding man in a white coat in tow.

"It's good to see your personality back- at least, somewhat."

"What do you mean?" asked Evans, eyes narrowed.

"Your paranoia is back. But your problem-solving skills, clearly, aren't, together with most of your memories and your language recognition. Where are you?"

"Germany, probably."

"No, Holland. You jumped to conclusions, and it cost you. And it is still 1988, by the way."

"Thanks a lot, bozo. I really needed that meaningless info dump, which _totally_ explains the random room you put me in and the traps. Yeah, right. Now what's with the Yankees cap? What the hell, you bastard, you knew abou…"

Then the familiar needle, but this time everything was completely different.

ooooo

January 19, 1983.

A toddler lay on a cot, in a small cupboard. He was crying. Evans didn't know why, and it irked him. He remembered nothing from that day, but the scratch marks on the calendar suggested it was that day. _What an idiot. Remind me again why I cared about the date? _He was dressed in…well, a blanket made for beluga whale pajamas, which seemed to be Dudley's castoffs from age four. So this was his mysterious past. Big deal. _Was this Freudian? Would he see Petunia naked around now? If he did, so help him God, he would find out the idiot who thought this was therapy and murder him. Then he'd burn his house, and his children, and his favorite band players, and __**their**__ wives and family. It seemed fitting. He __**had **__seen that travesty of nature, and wished never to repeat it._

But thankfully, it appeared he would be spared. Proto-Evans was writhing in his cupboard, crying and clutching his scar, which bled an unearthly black substance and glowed red. _Scars didn't do that. Was this a hallucination? Good Lord, not more of them! _He cried out again, and a cloud of white enveloped him. It ran in a thick mist over the scar, and congealed over it, causing the infant to shriek again. Tears ran down his face. Then the cloud dissipated, almost anticlimactically, and Mini-Evans sat up.

But the expression- what a look for a baby! Cold cynicism was plain in his face, and he dipped his fingers in the inky scar residue. On the wall, with shaking fingers, he wrote, painstakingly. But whatever it was the child wrote was impossible to say. _This happened. I'm sure of it. Mostly._

_ooooo_

March 19, 1984.

The calendar was gone, thankfully, but he _(what should he call himself? Potter would do, he supposed, as __**whoever**__ that child was seemed incomprehensible to him). _Anyhow, _Potter _was drawing with his own blood on a piece of paper. It seemed to be a model of a cruise missile. _At four? _The schematics were detailed as hell, down to the grade of metal used for the nose cone, and equations were scattered everywhere on the page. At the tip was a full drawing of a nuclear bomb. Books surrounded him, scattered over the floor, on atomic physics and calculus, as well as seventeen on aircraft design.

Now the memories started to blur together.

…Potter in the library, devouring a book on aerodynamics…

…Potter holding a match, lighting a fuse to an unearthly contraption in a junk heap…

…Potter screaming in joy as a house blew into unrecognizable splinters…

And they congealed.

Potter was writing a list, but this time Evans could read the handwriting. The title read, "Fundraising Strategy #4: A Unilateral Approach to the Support of Forward-Thinking Academic Research," and the items that followed sickened him.

"Stage No. 1: Gather together list of local thieves willing to work with gasoline.

Stage No. 2: Locate refineries in the Colonies and Great Britain close to major harbors.

Stage No. 3: Hack into databases of several major American banks.

Stage No. 4: Withdraw $138,123 in dollars from them.

Stage No. 5: Charge expenses on budget to consultant fees.

Stage No. 5: Find unscrupulous robbers from Great Britain…."

Etc. etc. etc, and so on and so forth ad infinitum, detailing hundreds of petty thefts, larceny, murder, and outright bribery, until he reached the end.

"Stage No. 2356: Locate companies which are favored by the keynote speaker at the 1987 science fair.

Stage No. 2357: Steal fifty bottles of wine from said companies.

Stage No. 2358: Add mood-altering drugs to wine.

Stage No. 2359: Break into security corporations which are responsible for alarm systems at keynote speaker's residence the day before 1987 science fair.

Stage No. 2360: Disable alarms of said speaker.

Stage No. 2361: Break into home and replace their wine bottles with altered ones.

Stage No. 2362: When back at Dursleys, drink chemicals to erase memories of this list and actions mandated by it.

Stage No. 2363: Let anger do the rest. I know what to do in a riot. May God help the bastard who tries to stop me!"

This must be the backstory for the first memory he had. _Strange that I was so passionate about the whole thing. This makes no sense.__  
_

_ooooo_

He awoke on a marble countertop, completely undressed but covered in enough flour and pie crusts that it didn't really make a difference. Before, the test had been designed to give him an aneurysm. Now it was just psychedelic, which would undoubtedly mean he'd be only more embarrassed. _What the hell next?_

Once more, he did the obligatory check of his surroundings- which, incidentally, was the middle of fucking nowhere in a forest – and sat back down on the slab. This didn't seem like it would get him anywhere. No trails, no footprints, no tree marks, no supplies, nothing but a marble slab and pie crusts. Well, there was nothing for it. He started eating. He would be naked in a few hours. He didn't care, at this point. Not like there was anybody watching who didn't fucking know what he looked like already.

By his fifteenth crust, it was already dark, and he could see a light in the distance a few miles off.

This was ridiculous. But it was getting cold, and he didn't want to freeze to death. He wondered how he'd sneak into…whatever that building was. _"I'm sorry; my kinky girlfriend dumped me for no apparent reason in a forest in the middle of nowhere." As if anybody could explain being covered in flour. _Still…who said anything about talking?

He walked forward a few paces, stopped to feel his feet, which already were getting pricked with stones and twigs, then started jogging at a brisk pace, never turning his eyes off the light. The stars were already twinkling, and it was getting colder every minute.

Seventeen thousand rocks to the feet later, he arrived at a fence, twenty-five meters high and coated with barbed wire. A spotlight flickered a few meters in the distance, scanning constantly for God knew who. The wall was solid marble, and looked absolutely impenetrable. He had no tools or rope this time, and he highly doubted a pie-crust rope would hold out for much longer than a few seconds. The trees were only seven meter tall, not nearly enough to scale the wall, and there seemed to be no trees on the other side. Nothing was visible but just the wall.

Property check. Seventeen pie crusts, a coating of flour, and some leaves lying on the ground. That covered it. Nothing to chop down trees, either. Wood would be nice. Nothing lay in front of the walls but a large piece of met-

ooooo

December 23, 1988.

Absolut Nirgends, Germany. The largest air base in the world, and it showed. Taking up almost a thousand square kilometers of the Black Forest, it held almost twenty-five thousand attack aircraft, and seventy thousand nuclear missiles. Absolutely secret from any other government in the world, even Germany. Protected by the best magical wards in the known universe.

And now that Evans saw it, it seemed almost mythical.

The landscape was blanketed with railroad lines, covering most of the landscape, and sixty-foot long train cars pulled by tanks crawled up and down them, for miles and miles on end. Barbed wire coated the rest of the soil, except for a few green acres at the housing division. Oil derricks dragged the water that pooled in missile silos into black lakes, hundreds of meters deep, and open fires could be seen as the areas of Black Forest still remaining were set to the flamethrower and destroyed. Runways innumerable covered the rest of the base, and hangars filled to the inch with bombers and A-10s ready to strike the Soviet Union at a moment's notice.

Seven hundred kilometers to the east, the Soviets used to have their own base, but it had not been warded against satellites, and when the Americans spotted it the entire complex had been burnt to cinders in less than a week. The Army claimed the remains, and even now was recreating a second Absolut Nirgends, to hold a million infantry and a fleet of tanks. Half of the world economy was managed by the black division of the DoD, to fund the bases- trillions upon trillions of dollars.

It was heaven, though it could be said to look like hell.

However, philosophical discussions were irrelevant. Testing of the XP-47 was scheduled to take place here, for three or so weeks, and that was the priority, not sightseeing. If accepted, five percent of AN's fleet would be replaced with it, and he would get seven billion dollars and the replaced aircraft for his trouble. If not, he would probably have his mind wiped, and sent to a remote corner of Siberia for close surveillance. The DoD was a bitch like that.

Though he was no doubt a partial observer, he would say that the Delta Dart II handled the approach to AN well. Aircraft coming here literally had to dive-bomb in from fifty thousand feet, at a sixty degree angle, and pick their way through the hundreds of trainers which infested Germany's airspace before landing. Usually, this was done on autopilot, but so far, this aircraft had survived forty thousand feet vertically without it, and appeared to be able to survive twenty more.

An A-10 flashed past him, the seventeenth so far, and the altimeter showed him at fifteen thousand. The base had no air traffic control, as radio signals were constantly jammed to prevent operational leaks, and the cockpit was strangely silent.

Ten thousand feet. Feet? What were those? He only did meters. Still, protocol.

Ten B-52s were on approach directly for him, and he dipped down vertically and plunged at five hundred knots an hour towards the nearest runway he saw.

Five thousand feet.

He pulled up, violently, and wrenched the Delta Dart to a level altitude, barely missing another A-10, and lined up for the runway.

Twenty-five hundred.

Spotlights were trained at him, for reasons incomprehensible, and he squinted for a split second before shoving the visor down.

One thousand.

The gear came down, and he checked if any other plane was landing here. They weren't, fortunately. _Thank God for small mercies._

Five hundred.

Two hundred, then one hundred, fifty, thirty, and he touched down with a shriek of rubber. The plane rattled violently, but kept on course…

ooooo

_That is what this place is? Good God, I'm smack-dab in the middle of the Black Forest in front of the most secret place in the entire damn world, with no credentials, no supplies, and no food but fucking pie crusts! _He cursed again, and wondered where in the hell the entrance was. He looked down at his feet, and his eyes lit up. It was that same piece of metal he had bumped into _(before that bloody vision. Not that it wasn't useful, but I could have missed the metal! Did I just say __**bloody?**__ The hell is wrong with my expletives?) _He took it up, walked to the nearest tree, and began sawing.

A quarter of an hour later, the tree was down. Then he cut it in half, and in half again down the middle, until he had a good sized ladder to scale the wall. It was three meters too high, but that made little difference. Down there he'd probably find only railroad tracks and angry guards, but that was immaterial; if he got shot at least he wouldn't starve to death. The makeshift ladder was glued together with a bastard mixture of flour and dirt, and then hoisted to the wall. Evans climbed.

Over the wall was…gravel. Piles and piles of gravel littered the ground, along with pickaxes and huge chunks of granite, littered with barbed wire. This was a plot. He threw down a pie crust, and his suspicions were confirmed when the gravel flew through the air in small chunks, blown by land mines. At least the ground was clear. He jumped, and then wished he hadn't when he hit the ex-pile, still a good twenty meters high. It hurt, but nothing was broken.

And then what?

He waved out, screaming for help, and he was answered when an A-10 appeared right the fuck out of nowhere and dropped a bomb on him. He ran, only to trip over barbed wire and fall down the pile, breaking his head on a pickaxe. The bomb exploded behind him, sending gravel flying, which pelted his legs and chest, and barbed wire, which thankfully missed him. Thirteen soldiers started running towards him, screaming in what sounded like German, which he could understand, for whatever reason. Probably those repressed attributes again. One was masked, who seemed to be the leader.

"_Who the hell are you?" _somebody shouted.

"_I'm Evans, and I'm here in the Middle of Nowhere," _he screamed back._ That was what Absolut Nirgends meant, right? What a dumb joke._

"_Come with us."_

Then the commander pulled off his mask. Lieutenant 119 again. Good God.

"Very good problem solving; you've improved a lot from your last try. Coordination seems…off, but you never really had much of that. Memories better?"

"I was a bitch back then, wasn't I?"

"No, you were always convincing in person. But yes, you were like that. Always ready to do what was necessary, even if it meant crime. You were idealistic about that; very. Always the goal for you, never a thought about others besides the members of your group. Your loyalties were clear back then. But the memories- they're not all back?"

"Not all of them. You're at the last stage now. You'll get your personality back, probably. Do you know why we had you on a countertop?"

"No."

"Neither do I," said 119, and the needle got to him. Again.

ooooo

Dreamscape.

He was on an infinite railroad line, stretching from him to the right through a forest so tangled you couldn't see five meters into it and stretching on to the left into a sea of crystal water, on a trestle bridge that stretched as far as the eye could see. In the middle, where he was, was a balanced scale, in the center of a grassy field, and Potter was standing by the scale, holding it in his right hand.

"Evans."

"What is it? Who are you?" Evans whispered.

"I'm not Potter. Never was. I'm you. Do you know why you're Evans, not Potter? Do you want to?"

"No, and yes."

"A good answer, that. Do you see this diary?"

"No."

"Look into my eyes. Now look at my left hand. What do you see?"

"A…diary."

"Now read it. I'll be back when you're done, Evans. Enjoy."

He walked up to Potter, who was grinning madly, and slowly took hold.

"Not like that, Evans. Faster. You want to know, don't you? I can see it in your eyes. You want to know, because you want to know everything. How sentimental. Take it."

Evans snatched it from his hand, and Potter disappeared with a shriek of laughter and wings on his back. He opened it at the last page, and started to read.

"August 17th. James looked at me again, and I could see the tenderness in his eyes again. I want to let go, let go with him. I've kept up my crusade for long enough. He cares, and I love him for it. The truth doesn't. The Helix project is over. I don't want to know whatever it is the secrets of magic are; that will only destroy the world I want. I want to be Lily Potter, not the architect of the new world. Let others continue, if they wish. I transfer my intellect to this diary, where it will find an impressionable youth and make him like I was - committed to knowledge. Let heaven help us if an evil man should find it.

Lily Evans."

Then he flipped to the first page.

"May 20, 1976. Today marks the first day of the Helix project, and by the grace of God it will never be the last. Today I seek the source of magic itself, to gift it to all mankind, and this will mark the last day ignorance shall lay hold of men.

May 21st, 1976. Nobody has joined me. Even the Muggleborns are apathetic to the truth, and have scorned me and my work. Nonetheless, truth will prevail, even unto the end of the age. The world will be better because of me."

Then Potter reappeared.

"That's quite enough for a mind like you to discover the truth, Evans," he chortled. "Now why are you Evans, not Harry Potter?"

"I'm like my mother more than my father?"

"Wrong, Evans! Wrong, wrong, wrong! Why?"

"I worked with helixes?"

"No, but you're closer. My, I've fallen so far since the XP-47 test. It would have taken me a second to figure this one out."

"…"

"Talk, Evans," Potter spat. "I'm a figment of your imagination, and haven't time for your idiocy. Why?"

"I'm the…architect of the ne…"

"New world, Evans! And it only took you seventeen seconds to do it! Not even a tenth as good as you used to be, but then again, you're Confunded to be an idiot, though that'll change. Bye! And, by the way, I'm nothing like you were. I'm just a helpful kick in the pants from medications. So long!" He threw Evans the scale, and disappeared.

The scale vanished too, and he blacked out immediately.

He woke up on a bridge, an old, weather-beaten steel bridge in a stormy ocean. It creaked and groaned in the gale that blew, but held together. A railroad line ran down it, which seemed never to end, rusted and cracked with age. In front of him stood a young man with a violin tucked under his arm, reading a newspaper with the headline, "Prodigy in Little Whinging!" He was dressed in nothing but a pair of shorts and a Red Sox cap, but didn't seem at all cold in the storm.

"Who are you?" Evans said, curious to see if he'd respond at all. If that person was anything like the last one, though, somebody would very soon be floating in the water, and that person wouldn't be Evans.

"That person you saw before, on the last railroad- who was he?"

"Answer my damn question!"

"Did he have wings?" the violinist said, patiently.

"Yes. Now get to the point!"

"He was the ghost of Christmas past, an overused metaphor so clichéd it astounds me how your brain came up with it. He came to taunt you, and he succeeded only partially. He sought to drive you mad with the revelation of your role, but you survived it intact. Why? That's why I'm here; to show you who you are. I'm the ghost of your own life, circa 1989. Incident day. Bus day."

"You…knew…about the bus?"

"I'll tell you, Evans. I'll show you. Do you see a television?"

"No…but I will, won't I?" He smirked, but it was the smirk of the bored, and it faded soon after.

A tank-like locomotive barreled down the tracks, with the familiar boxcar of missiles in tow, and Evans had no time to duck. It hit him, and the violinist, but they found themselves inside the car, pitch black inside, and Red Sox Man began again.

"It was a spring Thursday in 1989. Here, let me show you!" A television flickered on, on the other side of the car, out of the darkness, and he could see himself, but not the confused, bedraggled youth who was waiting for a bus to take him to Heathrow. James, as he would call his avatar, was holding a briefcase, the same one he had taken before, and the same clothing. It was dark, almost two in the morning.

Out of nowhere, on the screen, a purple-robed man jumped out, and shouted a few words, inexplicably causing James to fall down in a dead faint. He muttered what appeared to be Latin, which Evans could understand, inexplicably.

"Confuse the brain of this man, and let it be dull and malleable. Let him forget all he has learned with it that concerns those more powerful than he. Let him forget the memories of this conversation, and indeed the last few years. So I say, so may it be!"

The screen turned off, and the boxcar doors opened. Evans and the violinist jumped out, landing on the girders of the bridge.

"That's how you lost your memories, Evans. Magic. That's why you changed. It's over, at least, most of it. The memories will all come back after the next messenger. In the meantime, my work is done. Enjoy your life, and goodbye."

"But what's magic?"

No answer but unconsciousness.

ooooo

He was in the cabin of a freighter aircraft, sitting on a pallet of bananas. Strawberry jam coated the rest of the cabin, inexplicably, and jelly beans were studded in the mess. All in all, he seemed to be in the only dry spot in the plane, as the bananas appeared to be made of marble. A hunched figure was sitting in a thick clot of jam, licking his fingers. Evans cursed. _A fucking eccentric? Damn it all!_

Then the jam and bananas disappeared, and he fell to the floor, hitting his head on the empty pallet next to him. The figure stood up, revealing himself. He was dressed in one large piece of duct tape, with a sticker on it that said, "Hello! My name is Harry!" Somehow Evans knew this wouldn't go well for him.

"I'm Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived. But you can just call me Harry! I go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, with my friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley! My potions teacher is evil, but otherwise this school is awesome! I'm the only one that can save the wizarding world from the Dark Lord Voldemort, so that gives me fame which makes me unhappy! Isn't that sad!"

"What the hell?"

"Ugh, that impression leaves me wanting to throw up. I'm the ghost of Christmas whatever the fuck dimension your stupid mind has me in, and I'm here as a warning, oddly enough. The others didn't tell you anything that didn't make your head hurt?"

"No."

"Not surprising. This whole treatment regimen sucks. Anyway, I'm another one of those stupid figments of your imagination, and I'm here to give you your memories and a stupid warning."

"A copyright warning? _**"Blah blah blah copyright, blah blah blah ownership, blah blah piracy, blah blah blah blah **_blah." That's over and done with."

"You trying to drive me insane, Evans? I swear you're just like those other ghosts. Shut up and let me finish. I'm the person you understand the most- I'm a mental projection of the annoying bitch you've become during this whole procedure, so take your medicine and shut up."

"I'm sort of insane here from the testing. Sorry."

The figure heard him - paused - then began again.

"The warning is as follows. Don't eat anything at Hogwarts. Make planes not babies. Until you're seventeen, in which case that'll be important for your life. Don't sleep unsecured at Hogwarts. If Dumbledore looks at you look right the fuck away. Don't bother with that boring transfiguration crap, test into Runes and Arithmancy first year; you'll be glad you did. Now that's out of the way. I'm going back to my jelly. See you later."

Then pain, and a sense of growing realization.

ooooo

The dreams were over, and Evans was delighted to be back.

This room was just heaven! He was locked in a hangar with titanium and all sorts of metals, copper wire, plastic, a smelter, tools, a printer and a computer, paper and a pencil, and thirteen soldiers standing in a row with signs saying "Hello, how may I help you?" In short, the testers had just given him a mandate to make a plane, and escape to wherever he wanted. _Sweet._

He walked over to the paper, grabbed it, and threw it down on a sheet of metal. He began writing.

"XP-48 Mach 5 Transport Aircraft, Version 1.0. Capable of hypersonic speeds without high-cost materials. Radar absorbent. Able to take off in less than 500 meters without catapult. Can be made in less than fifteen minutes."

He thought for a moment, then drew a Concorde on the paper. The Olympus engines were erased immediately, replaced by two helix generators. _God, he loved those things. _They were made without the customary europium finish, but the copper paneling more than made up for the lack of red paint. Seventeen moving parts were removed from the design, with an entirely new part to replace them, then twenty-five more, and soon the generators were down to five parts.

The outer skin was changed to Alloy 18, which had the property of converting radar waves to light, and the cockpit windows were removed and replaced with touchscreens inside that showed the runway. The buttons and knobs (good Lord, there were too many to count) were all taken out, and replaced with a throttle, a joystick, and a modified car GPS. _That was…unoriginal. _For fun, he took out the tail fin, and put three at 120 degree angles to each other on the front. Sounded good.

Then he turned to the crew, still stiff as a post.

"Can you build this?"

"Given about seven hours."

He went back to the design sheet, and made a note of the human manufacturing time, then gave them the sheet. He fell asleep.

He woke up six hours later, with the transport finished, and the crew clambered in. The hangar doors were opened, and, to his surprise, he found himself by a runway at Absolut Nirgends. It didn't matter. The crew clambered on, the door was closed, and in short order, they were in the air heading for Norway.

_Let's see. Is the test finished? Memories seem to be complete. Languages are functional. Personality…as utilitarian as before. Test over!_

The pilot, a short woman in tall boots, clambered out of the cockpit. She looked at him, laughed, then pulled off her mask. 119. Good Lord, this was repetitive.

"That all the surprises you've got?"

"No." And Lt. 119 pulled off his mask.

"Hermione? Miss Granger?"

"Welcome back, Evans. We've missed you."

oooooo

The hotel room, Evans thought, could have been just like any other – boilerplate art depicting some flower or other, a bed with a mattress that could have been mistaken for a soggy bag of flour, obscene wallpaper with more floral decorations, and repeated messages to conserve water lying on tables and chairs. But abiding by hotel rules seemed to be no priority during psychotherapy. The Air Force had coated the walls with television screens, each depicting pictures of aircraft, or missiles, or indeed any kind of airborne device, and the bed he would ordinarily sleep on was replaced with a couch, on which he had probably spent the night. The carpet had been torn out, and replaced with solid iron, and on the tables lay half a dozen pistols and a trunk filled to the brim with hand grenades.

The bed so thoughtfully removed was occupied by one Hermione Granger, who seemed not to appreciate wet cooking supplies any more than he did, as evidenced by the dark circles under her eyes. She stood half a meter behind him, holding a clipboard, on which she was frantically scribbling notes. Thankfully, the period of needle-induced hallucinations was over, as nobody else was in the room and the pajamas she was in seemed to have no pockets. They also had suspicious bulges near the waistline, but at least a motion there would be easy to spot and counter.

He ambled over to her, trying to snatch a glimpse of whatever she was writing, but this proved distinctly unsuccessful, as evidenced by a swift blow to the head, which knocked him sprawling on the metal floor. The notes seemed to keep flowing from her hand, for the space of half a minute. He looked curiously at the pen; and frowned when he saw that it had a second button on the end which _might_ contain a needle.

She kept writing, a little faster, and he backed away slowly to the air conditioner a few meters behind him, trying not to make enough noise to distract her from her clipboard and risk the pen. This succeeded for a few seconds, but then she looked up, and beckoned. He shuddered.

_Damn it, the pen! If I go, I'll be skewered, and if I stay she'll most likely come back and attack me anyway. What do I do? Do I run? If I do that, I'll have to tackle her first. Is there a reason to suspect her? The last two times I woke, there was some sort of test, so this must be the end – right? But what about that second button? What the hell. Only one way to find out what's happening._

"Hermione Granger, what the fuck is going on? Why haven't we landed, why don't I know why I am, why did I hallucinate the ghost of Christmas Past and call him Potter, and why the hell did I read Dickens anyway?"

"Curious," she muttered. "I didn't think he'd start asking for a good minute. His senses must be coming back. Looking good." Then she answered, a little louder, "Sit down and let me explain, please."

_That doesn't sound like something Hermione would say. _"Is that a script?"

"Why would I tell you?"

_This is definitely a test. _He bolted to…whoever it was, and started pulling at her face, which promptly started to tear. _A mask! _He ripped off the last of the rubber that covered…whoever it was, revealing padding and a few circuit boards. He punched it in the face, then grabbed the pen and started to bolt for the door.

"Good. You've passed stage one of evaluation. Congratulations! Stage two begins…now."

The second button fell off, and a needle shot out into his skin. _Damn it!_

_00000_

_Where am I?_

He lay stretched out on a marble pedestal, two meters high, which stood in what looked like an ocean. The water was almost completely clear, preventing him from gauging its depth, and teeming with fish and a few squid.

This was no hallucination; it was too vivid to be anything other than another test. The wind whipped over him, stirring up the water and whistling on the curves of the pedestal. A shoreline loomed several miles off; a mountainous wasteland which immediately rose up into jagged peaks, and void of any life but a few barren shrubs. On his pillar lay piles of paper and a few packs of chewing gum, and a pencil, which was somewhat disappointing loot for a shipwrecked mental patient. It was warm that day, and exceedingly humid, and it seemed to him he must be near the Andes; the weather matched that part of the world exactly.

There was nothing to do but swim; the weather was far too hot to stay in the sun. He jumped in, leaving the paper behind, and plunged underwater, then kicked off to shore. It seemed unreasonable, but there was no point in staying on the pillar; he'd have to leave sooner or later.

_They should have given me some food. _Unless there was another secret base like the one at AN he discovered, he'd probably starve to death in a week or so, and that form of mental treatment, though adequate at stopping mental illness, left something to be desired for the comfort of the patient. _My sense of humor seems to be slipping. Perhaps I should take a rest, on shore._

An hour later, he reached out and caught a squid, which he promptly attempted to strangle. It was hard work, as he couldn't quite seem to locate its gills, but eventually it gave up its ghost, and he dropped it. _I seem to have no sense of violent humor. Perhaps that's good, but then…I won't have as much food to eat, seeing as I don't enjoy killing. Bother. _He struggled on, now only three-quarters of a mile away.

Fifteen minutes after that, he had come to an rough understanding of why exactly horses didn't like running the Kentucky Derby; namely, traveling seventy-five percent of a mile under one's own power was not exactly conducive to a sense of relaxation. Swimming seemed not to be his forte, and he resolved to take it up when he got back to England. _That way, if I'm stranded again in the middle of a tropical ocean with no food but chewing gum on a pillar in a cognitive abilities test with land too far away to discern, I'll probably be prepared. This sort of thing happens too much for my taste. Some tea would be nice._

At the shoreline, he stopped, and looked for the pillar, which seemed to have gone missing, and he wondered idly if he could have taken any paper over without it getting wet. Drawing seemed a good idea; a harmless pastime in a desert island (or more realistically, continent), and he decided to swim back.

When he came back, pencil and remarkably unsoaked paper high above his head, it seemed to him not the wisest of his many decisions. Swimming without using arms took longer than expected, and swimming without feet proved no better. Climbing a wet pillar was worse, but then the climb was the least of his worries, the chiefest being food. Six miles of swimming worked up a good appetite in a person.

He climbed the hill, expecting a military base, and so was not inordinately surprised when an A-10 flew over him and gave him a splendid tea-time gift of a cluster bomb. It had the unfortunate side effect of causing a landslide, losing his hard-earned paper, and half-burying him under rubble, but that was all fun and games when rocks caused injuries and no doctors were nearby. _Let it not be said that I lose my wits under fire. Or, at least, my low sense of wit. _In case the first gift of a bomb seemed miserly, another fell in quick succession, which served to bury him in fresh gravel and break a few baby teeth.

Evans' Seven Stages of Anger were forced joviality, bitter sarcasm, placid coolness, glacial politeness, bitter resentment, foaming rage, and…even Evans had not seen the seventh stage, being not usually irritable except when mentally hijacked. The first two were exhausted, and the third soon showed itself after the third cluster bomb. A few soldiers arrived at the scene, doubtless to offer him some morning tea, and he greeted them warmly before they smacked him in the face and forced him on the ground with a gun poking the back his head.

"Good afternoon!" he said again, slightly more muffled than before, as blood was pooling in his mouth.

"Tell us everything! Where do you come from? What's your operating number? Who's your boss? Tell us! You don't want to answer? We'll make it so you never will!"

"It seems to me you have the wrong person. I was just taking a stroll on the beach and up the hill when a jet and now you said your hellos."

"Shut up! Where's your base, pilot?"

"I'm not wearing a pilot's uniform, unfortunately; though I do wish for a plane to get myself out of this present unpleasantness. I'm sorry I can't help you. Good day!"

"Tell us!"

"It seems unfortunate that you are unable to determine my occupation, but rest assured I feel the same way as you – rather irate at my profession's ambiguous uniform."

"Shut the fuck up and tell us who you are! You've got no way of escaping, so why don't you cooperate?"

_This is…not my version of a tropical paradise. _"It seems to me you and I have a fundamental communication problem, which unfortunately makes your interrogation somewhat hard to continue given said issue. Good day."

The speaker sighed. "Kill him."

It seemed unreasonable to Evans, at that moment, that he should die when stage two wasn't even done, and he decided he'd had quite enough interrogation for one day. He wrenched free of the guard who held the gun, and shot him in the face. The round turned out to be a blank, however, and an…undue amount of physical force had to be resorted to in knocking the man unconscious. Evans caught a blank to the head for that, and made up for it by beating the shooter, knocking out his teeth and then sending him sprawling on the floor.

Then the A-10 graced the spot with its presence, and fired an anti-tank missile at the scene, this time breaking one of his arms with the shrapnel. He started running, utterly disoriented, and in short order collapsed. The guards did not follow, being blown to pieces by the explosion, and when a cluster bomb fell for the third time Evans was past caring. _What the hell were those people thinking with this test? This is mind-bogglingly absur—_

He blacked out.

_00000_

He awoke in the booth of a café, a small, pleasant establishment that seemingly sold British tea. Several other patrons, seemingly American and English, were eating, which reassured him this wasn't a trap, but the window he looked through showed busy streets, with crowds of Chinese businessmen shuffling by.

He seemed healed from his injuries, and remarkably energized despite his…exercise. Idly, he wondered who volunteered to guard him, seeing as they were dead now, but gave it little thought. _They didn't even give me any tea! At tea-time, no less! How…plebian of them. Dash it all._

In front of him lay a pad of paper, with the logo of an American hotel on it, and a pen. There was no second button on the pen, but nonetheless, when he pushed it down, he made sure the button that supposedly pushed the tip out was activated by the table and not his hand. There was no such thing as being too careful. But there was no threat. He relaxed. _Hermione didn't lie. The tests were over._ Thirty wrapped stacks of hundred-dollar bills were also on the table.

He began writing.

"Strategic Misinformation and Situational Ignorance Countermeasures: Stage A.

-The first order of business, in my situation, is to discover where exactly I am. This is imperative. All escape plans depend on the existence of a nearby airport, and currency exchange. Should escape become necessary, I must know how to reach an airport, and while I know where the major airports are in Japan, I have no idea how to reach them.

-The second order of business is to learn more about my treatment – how to interpret the various hallucinations I had, and process the memories I have.

-The third order of business is to learn whether my emancipation has been revoked – such an event would be disastrous.

-Fourthly, the state of Vernichtung GmbH's corporate secrecy must be addressed as quickly as possible. Should the full activities of the black division be revealed, my life and the lives of my employees would be at risk. I must examine the organization for security leaks. If, as the second clichéd ghost claimed, I have been attacked by a member of a mysterious organization using mystical powers, it is imperative that said organization must not be allowed to exist, as my mind may very well have been entered with malicious intent.

-Lastly, I must receive a financial statement of my assets and my company's. My investment strategy may very well be unsuited for the current economy, and revenue must continue to be earned at our present rate if the grey division is to become fully operational."

Then he tore off that page, and started writing again, sketching a picture of a wing structure for some unknown project, but soon the drawing became incomprehensible, coated with depictions of parts and their structure, and, as was the plan, it became unreadable to any but his technical division, Hermione, and himself.

_Speaking of Granger, there's a question I need to ask. Why did I swear so much during my testing period? I gave up strong language the day after she joined me. That's…exceptionally unusual, and remarkably suspicious._

He put the drawing in his pocket, then the pad and pencil, and waited. Outside, the crowds had dissipated, and he could see English shop names as well. _Okay, I'm in Hong Kong. This isn't bad, actually. This is British soil, and I'm still a British citizen last I checked, so I won't need a passport. That leaves one hurdle out of the way; I don't know what I would do without one._

Ten minutes later, Hermione had not appeared, or indeed anyone from America or Britain or Germany that he knew, but a mugger had, who tried to swipe one of the folds of money on the table. Evans…took objection to having his money stolen, and laid him on the floor in the space of a few seconds, but apparently the mugger was Hermione, who probably wanted to pay for some tea. That was unfortunate, but at least he had Hermione back.

"What the dickens, Evans? I realize when I signed on to help you the doctors said you had no human decency, but this is insane! At least look to see who you're KOing before you put paid to them!"

"Miss Granger, I'm sorry," he said, slowly, "but don't try that again. And anyway, why did you give me U.S. dollars when we're in Hong Kong?"

"Er…that's okay. Don't mention it. And we're in New York, by the way, in Chinatown. Why there's a British teahouse here…that's a long story. Mind if I sit down?"

"Yes," he replied, a little relieved, "but please try not to knock the bills on the floor; they're sort of coating the table here."

"Makes sense to me. Now, can I see that list, please?"

"What list? You mean that one I wrote a little before you came?"

"Yes, that one."

He fished it out of his jacket pocket, and unfolded it. She looked it over, heaved a sigh, and turned to him.

"Look," she said, "I'd better tell all this from the beginning."

_00000_

"The ghost of Christmas Past was assigned the name Potter, merely because it was in your name. It was used mostly to test your thinking skills, and infuriate you. Christmas Present was to show you the circumstances of your mind-wipe, and calm you down a bit for the next. Christmas Future…well, by that time I just got bored with your case, to be frank. I wanted to see my parents."

"What's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, by the way, and who's Ron Weasley?"

"We got that information from part of your mind – oh, did I explain it to you? The bit about the alternate consciousness?"

"No, I don't think you did. I haven't heard about it, at any rate."

"Well, it's a long story. Do you remember when we showed you that funny memory about white light entering your scar? Well, it's something like that. You see, your mother Lily Evans (before she was Lily Potter) wrote a diary with the instructions to a rudimentary prototype of the helix generator, and funneled most of her IQ into a time-activated diary that would give it to some ambitious researcher, which happened to be you. Only she understood more of what the generator actually did. You know how that generator gives off EMPs whenever it's run, and we have to shield all the cockpit and the wireless? Well, that's because of magic. You know the shields around Absolut Nirgends, code-named MAGIC? It's an in-joke, that's actually the name of whatever runs them. Magic can be controlled to do anything through the use of a programming language called Rune. It emanates from special fields in the earth, but actually can be generated, and that's what the helix generator does – creates magic. So apparently she was a researcher at eleven years of age up to seventeen before she quit her job to marry one James Potter, a slacker. That's the real reason why…"

"Why I call myself Evans. She should have continued; but she stopped, all for an infernal playboy who could play obscure sports and thought he was Einstein for it. But that doesn't answer the original question, though it _is _very interesting. Go on, please."

"Complaints about parentage aside, the personality change was put into the diary, but your scar reacted violently with it for reasons nobody really can explain, and you were possessed by some unknown entity up to the time you went on the bus. It deposited its knowledge and desire to learn, and stuck into your brain after it left. But then somebody tampered with your mind-"

"Was he in purple robes with moons on them?"

"We don't know what he looked like. We do know, however, that your brain planted an image of somebody attacking somebody that wasn't you, and somehow your mind played it to be you."

"Oh."

"That's why you were in treatment all that time. The tests…I just wanted to screw around with you, actually. None of them really happened; they were all inside your head. The government didn't have the money to fly you around to all those places anyway. You were so evil when you were possessed, did you know that?"

"Fiendish. But still, I'd like to think I have that ethos still."

"Your brain's up to speed, or will be in a few days, and your inquisitiveness will follow suit. Right now you're still affected by those awful mental retardants – the government was afraid you'd get away from us without explanation, so we had to get you so you'd stick around to listen – but you'll be better in a few days, I promise."

"And the company? Are we safe? And you didn't answer my question abo-"

"Have faith, Evans! Everything's all right; the stock's gone up almost five hundred percent since you've been gone, though people are wondering why we aren't starting any new aircraft lines. Our emergency plan worked splendidly; nobody wondered where you were except Polkiss, and he didn't raise any objections when we told him about your therapy."

"We?"

"The Secretary of the DoD and I. We lied to him about the condition, citing overwork as the cause, but the important thing is that security's okay."

"Good! So, how've you been? Done anything interesting recently? Blown up any buildings or anything with that lab of yours?"

"Now that you mentioned it, I might have wiped Iowa off the map…"

"Hermione!"

"Okay. Seriously, Evans, I built a half-centimeter thick television screen and a three-pound computer, but that's about it. It took me half a year just to get the screen down, can you – good God, what the hell is on the television? Do you see it?"

"Fucking hell, that's our office! What's going on?"

"Listen."

The voice on the screen, in a level voice, started speaking.

"_Three years ago, our correspondent in London witnessed the creation of the world's first true VTOL aircraft, the XP-42, made by one Harry Ptolemy."_

"Good to see our names are misspelled. At least that part of the plan worked."

"Shut up and listen."

"_Two years ago, Mr. Ptolemy managed to create a stable nuclear fusion reactor, which was put to work as a power source for various civil aircraft and military cargo planes, creating the possibility of infinite flight, and six months later, a revolutionary piece of technology known as P-39 was developed, which withstood temperatures of up to a million degrees. These have had widespread uses in the aviation industry. But shocking new details have come to light about Vernichtung GmbH, the aviation company in which he serves as CEO."_

_"_What in the bloody hell! What's wrong with our security? I made the plans myself! Nobody would talk!" Hermione shouted, forgetting her previous diatribe.

_"The corporation's Chief Information Officer, Piers P., who declined to give his last name,"_

"Polkiss betrayed us! What the bloody hell?" she shrieked again.

_"has come to this news station to divulge horrifying new revelations about the company's classified projects, which account for ninety-five percent of its revenue stream._

_"He revealed the existence of a bomb, code-named DD-1, with the power to destroy almost 33% of the earth's surface, and potentially destroy all human life. Small-scale prototypes have already been tested successfully on Mars, creating an asteroid belt around the planet, and over 30,000 have been sold to the United States Air Force, where they are stationed in secret locations around the world, set to fire at enemy cities._

_"Furthermore, over 500,000 bombers have been acquired by the USAF, to be equipped with nuclear and conventional weapons, capable of flight at 7.5 times the speed of sound. 753,234,000 tons of nuclear munitions have been made and placed in missile bases across Europe and Asia, and countless billions of conventional bombs have been produced in underground facilities in Area 51._

_"Missiles have been developed which can achieve up to Mach 9.5, and enter into geosynchronous orbit over strategic locations, ready to strike. Over ten thousand are already positioned over the Soviet Union and North Korea, on red alert. And, inexplicably, ten are ready to destroy this very news organization, and its reporters._

_"The United Nations has entered into Vernichtung GmbH's offices to seize papers pertaining to its illegal arms trade, but the office was leveled by a nuclear bomb before any information could be found, killing almost seven million people. It is unclear who launched the bomb, the USAF or Ptolemy himself, but most believe the attack was caused by Ptolemy. All other offices have been razed to the ground, preventing further investigation._

_"The United States has denied all allegations pertaining to Vernichtung, arguing that the sheer number of munitions and weapons bought is improbable, and that all such claims are impossible to prove. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union and all other threatened nations have decried the measure, calling the United States hypocritical and imperialistic._

_"The CEO of this corporation, Harry Ptolemy, and his assistant, Harlequin Gregory, are guilty of seven human rights violations and seventeen counts of crimes against humanity, and will be executed on sight. Any with information about their whereabouts should call 911 or their local emergency number. This is Nina Asplund for CNN Breaking News, New York, USA."_

A/N:

So far, there are no pairings planned for this story, but I'm waffling at the moment between R/Hr and H/Hr. Harry/Ginny, however, is definitely not on the table.

This is my first published story on this site, and constructive criticism of my writing style would be _greatly_ appreciated.

And though it seems as though Harry is inordinately accepting of memory loss, that** will **be explained in the next chapter; in fact, it's a major plot point.

Thanks!

**THIS PROLOGUE HAS BEEN ORWELLIAN RETCONNED JUNE 13, 2013, TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT FROM MY POOR PACING.**


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